Trauma, (and traumatised), are much used and sometimes misunderstood terms. The term trauma has a meaning in mainstream medicine in that it refers to a sudden violent injury. (I am sure that most of you will have heard, for example, of a leg broken by blunt force trauma).
In the psychological world, however, it is generally associated with severe emotional pain occurring from a sudden negative event, a shock or a devastating emotional injury that has the effect of temporarily numbing us or rendering us incapable of rational thought and behaviour.
You might have heard of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This is a medical term for a condition which affects people who have been in war-zones, or witness, or have been exposed to traumatic events such as house fires, car crashes, tragic accidents etc. where lives were lost and/or people suffered severe injuries. This type of trauma can be lodged in the body when the person is experiencing the event (or events), but can be triggered in a different environment – by, for example, a smell, a sight, a sound etc. – long after the need to be on high-alert has passed. This is sometimes called a flashback.
The type of trauma that this Chapter is about is similar to that – but in situations where the traumatic events are ongoing and continuous, and frequently occur in childhood, with little or no opportunity to heal. This is sometimes known as complex trauma, as its incidents and effects might be far more multifaceted and enduring than what is commonly known as PTSD.
Now the thing about trauma is that it is common to all forms of severe emotional distress and what is usually referred to as mental illness.
Let us consider trauma in respect of how our memory functions.
Every time we have an experience, the experience goes into our conscious memory, and then, (mostly) our unconscious memory. The experience is then assimilated, or absorbed, into our bank of memories. The memories meld into each other and, unless we have a particular reason for recalling one of them, the mixture of memories – our life’s experience – is a kind of background, or backdrop to our daily lives.
In respect of intense memories, I will borrow from Gestalt psychotherapy and use eating as an analogy. When we eat something our body assimilates that which we eat and we get nourishment and energy from it. If, however, we eat something that our body cannot assimilate, for example something toxic, our body rejects it – it cannot be digested and assimilated. We may reject it by vomiting, but if we don’t do that, we get ill.
Similarly, if we have a very intense emotional experience we do not assimilate, or absorb it – as we do with run-of-the-mill memories – instead it stays there.
I would say that you will have experiences from your childhood or youth (or even later in life) that have stuck in your memory. It might have been a very enjoyable experience, or an experience of some significance. An experience that causes a lot of pain – particularly if it is sudden and/or unexpected, (described as trauma) however, may cause us to dissociate (I’ll be describing dissociation in a later Sub-Chapter) so while the memory is not assimilated, it may not be available to conscious recall either – that is because it is too painful.
That is, it is lodged in our unconscious – so it will be influential even though we cannot really consciously remember it.
A bit like the panic in a crowd that I described here, the experience of trauma could mean that the individual becomes so stressed that his normal coping mechanisms cannot kick in to manage the emotions that result from the event.
Trauma can result from one event, or, as I said above, a series of events repeated over time. Feelings of being overwhelmed or unable to cope over years or even decades may result from the initial trauma as the person recalls the event and relives it – the influence of the unconscious that I also mentioned above.
This may happen even though the event that the person is experiencing in the present time may not threaten at all.
When I think of trauma that endures for years or decades in a person’s life I often think of a flywheel that keeps an engine running, that is, maintains the momentum in an engine. A much lesser amount of fuel (akin to a reminder of past trauma) is enough to keep the engine running because of the energy stored in the flywheel.
Serious, long-term negative consequences to physical, mental and emotional health can result from unresolved trauma.